The Third Urban Revolution

Fixing urban gridlock and pollution will require more than new technologies. Instead, we need to rethink how we design and build cities.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, cities were compact, limited by how far a person could walk or a horse could travel in a reasonable period of time.

The introduction of steam railways, followed by electric streetcars and subways, in the 19th century revolutionized the urban landscape.  They permitted cities to grow tremendously in both population and area and allowed people to escape the dense urban core for larger, less crowded dwellings at the urban fringe.

The automobile brought a second urban revolution that has permitted the almost-unlimited growth of our cities.   The new, auto-based city is characterized by very low density, single-use neighbourhoods (housing here, stores there, offices someplace else). 

Today, these cities are becoming increasingly dysfunctional.  The promise of mobility turns into congestion and gridlock.  Pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, consumption of farm land and natural habitat, road-based deaths and injuries: these and other problems mount as urban regions grow larger and larger. 

We need a third revolution in how we build our cities and in how we travel in them.  This means accelerating the conversion of cars from fossil fuels to electricity. and using information technology to make road and transit systems more efficient. 

But these technological improvements will not solve the fundamental challenge of how to maintain and improve quality of life, economic productivity, and environmental sustainability as our urban areas continue to grow. 

Rather than primarily technological, the 21st-century revolution requires a cultural and political shift in how we view our cities and a fundamental re-think of how we design and build them.  We need to design cities for people rather than cars.  We need to think holistically about streets and their myriad of functions – they are more than mere conduits for motorized vehicles. 

And, most important, we need to incorporate this thinking into the design of every new suburb, brownfield redevelopment, and master plan. We need to recognize that the design principles of the 20th-century auto-first city are not working and have not been working for some time.  The longer we cling to them, the more we will compound our problems and the less likely we will be able to build the cities that we and our children need. 

The challenge facing Canadian cities in the coming decade is to find ways to begin the evolution into this new, more sustainable urban form.  This new form must involve less reliance on the private car.  The car (hopefully electrified) will not disappear from our lives, but our cities must evolve in a way that more people require the car less in their daily lives. 

To do this, we must make more and better use of public transit, walking and bicycling.  For this shift to occur, three things must happen.  First, we must invest aggressively, innovatively and wisely in major upgrades to our public transit systems.  Second, we must rethink the street so that it is consistently an attractive and safe place to walk and bicycle.  And third, we must reconfigure our urban form so that transit and non-motorized travel are cost-effective, attractive alternatives to an automobile stuck in traffic. 

This last point is by far the most critical.  This revolution must be led not by transportation technology but by sustainable urban design principles.  New transit lines which do not effectively serve the travel patterns dictated by the urban form will not succeed. 

We must see the urban transportation problem as an urban design problem and begin holistically addressing it as such if we are to have any hope of building a 21st-century city in which anyone will care to live. 

The stakes are high: there are two futures out there.  One is a dystopia of endless congestion, dysfunctional cities, and declining quality of life.  The other is one of economic and social growth and a healthy, vibrant city.  Cities, however, are very long-lived with high inertia: we need to start today if a decade from now we are to see that we have “turned the corner” towards a more sustainable tomorrow.